American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman
and the Shoot-Out That Stopped It
by Stephen Hunter and John Bainbridge, Jr.
(Simon & Schuster, 384 pages, $26.95)
The firearms finikins at freerepublic.com, and they are legion,
favor one writer above all others for gun lore and gun adventure.
Stephen Hunter, author of novels including The Master
Sniper (1980), The Day Before Midnight (1989),
Point of Impact (1993), and Havana (2003), has
been for more than two decades the film critic of what his freeper
fans generally call “The Washington Compost,” in which position he
has won a Pulitzer Prize (and published Violent Screen, a
collection of his reviews). See the unofficial Stephen Hunter
website here here.
His theme might be described as “The American Gunfight,” that
interval when “there is no time, there is no clarity, there is no
logical sequence of events. Things happen as they happen, and under
massive stress men do what they will do. Physiological changes are
incredible: IQs drop, fingers seem to balloon inefficiently,
hearing shuts down, vision tunnels, peripheral perception
vanishes.”
Indeed, in his newest book, the non-fiction American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman
and the Shoot-Out That Stopped It, Hunter (with co-author John
Bainbridge, Jr.) repeats a near-identical version of that
description at least five times. In this holy mystery does Hunter
encapsulate the work of his life and reveal the American
character.
Fans of his fiction would find it difficult to urge his former
work on a wider audience than adventure and action readers. With
American Gunfight, Hunter makes it clear what he’s been up
to all along, and under what stylistic rubric: He works in New
Journalism, that splendid rich vein of American literature largely
untapped since Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff in 1979. Until
now, Hunter has confined this style to what appears to be fiction,
but in a sense is really not, especially in those Balzacian
intertwined novels of Earl Swagger, law man, and his son Bob Lee
Swagger, Vietnam vet. Now it is clear that Hunter has been a
historian all along.
GOOD HISTORY REQUIRES ADROIT FOCUS. One thinks of the incisively
positioned The Reckoning and The Breaks of the
Game, by David Halberstam. American Gunfight shares
that focused success; subject chosen, half the writer’s battle is
over. Who remembers an assassination attempt on Harry Truman? On
November 1, 1950, at 2:20 p.m. on a very hot Washington day, while
the President napped in an upstairs front bedroom at Blair House
(the White House, across the street, was being remodeled), two
Puerto Rican nationalists armed with German semiautomatic pistols
attacked the residence intending to kill Truman. The Secret Service
detail posted at Blair House responded, and a firefight of an
estimated 38.5 seconds took place. About 30 shots were exchanged in
two distinct fights — one at one end of the house frontage, one at
the other. A White House policeman and one of the would-be
assassins were killed — the assailant, ironically, by a head shot
fired by that very policeman at virtually the moment of his own
death, an unbelievable act of heroism. Three men were wounded,
including the other assassin.
Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola came very close to
succeeding. Here comes to the fore Hunter’s knowledge of guns.
Armed as they were with a Walther P-38 and a Luger, firing
two-handed, Collazo and Torresola substantially outgunned the much
larger force of White House protectors, who carried revolvers and
who had learned to fire them one-handed, at stationary bull’s-eye
targets, single action. The inexperienced Collazo flubbed his first
shot. Had he fired it successfully, the entire outer protective
force would have been down. Halfway through the fight, the
President woke up and looked out a window in his underwear.
Torresola, having downed the guards at the other end of Blair, was
reloading near the front steps. All he had to do was look up. The
moment passed.
THEY WERE NOT THE ARCHETYPAL LONE NUTS. Hunter and Bainbridge call
Torresola a “melancholy warrior.” Collazo, a scholar, was a
reluctant last-minute draftee. But they were genuine
revolutionaries, determined to bring “Don Pedro’s war” to the
United States. That “war” goes back more than a hundred years in
Puerto Rican history. “Don Pedro” was Don Pedro Albizu Campos,
Maximum Leader of the nationalist revolution, a lost cause if there
ever was a lost cause, but one that made Albizu Campos a Puerto
Rican folk hero for all that. This review cannot go into more
depth; it would simply take too long.
But Hunter and Bainbridge do, and it is one of the book’s
strengths that it brings to life the sorrow-soaked irredentist
romance of the sunny island. Never commanding more than a tiny
section of votes in conventional politics, Albizu Campos and his
followers turned to armed insurrection with a kind of relief — now
we can finally do what we have always intended to do. Albizu Campos
himself, a “star,” as the authors describe him, could have been an
early Alberto Gonzales, he was that talented. (A Harvard law grad
against unbelievable odds, he was reportedly offered a Supreme
Court clerkship; instead he ended up in the Atlanta federal
slammer.) The attempt on Truman in fact formed only a part of what
was intended to be a general uprising against the entire island
government. Only everything — everything — went wrong.
A good thing, too. The authors intriguingly suggest that
Torresola and Collazo were in fact a last-minute desperate stand-in
force. Five assassins might have been supposed to reconnoiter in
New York, then go to D.C. Five men armed with automatic pistols
would have created the Alben Barkley administration.
HOW THIS BOOK DOES SHINE. I mentioned “New Journalism.” Dig this,
as Hunter (this is Hunter) describes the Puerto Ricans’ emigration
from “splendor to squalor,” from the verdant green of their
homeland to the Big Apple:
The New York, New York that’s a hell of a town, where
the Bronx was up and the Battery down, eluded them, except via the
bitter low rungs of the service economy. The town where Fred and
Ginger tripped the light fantastic: they swept up the garbage after
the shoot. The Algonquin Circle, where wits and wags threw pearls
of polished venom at each other: no Puerto Ricans invited, except
for the busboy who policed the martini glasses with Dorothy
Parker’s smeared-lipstick cigarette butts in them. The New York
Athletic Club, where the old Irish Catholic politicos who ran the
city took their steam baths: the Puerto Ricans gathered the
sweat-soaked towels.
There is more, a whole book full of more, of personal sketches of
the assassins and the officers they confronted, of the President in
his band-box neat clothing taking his morning walks and a tot of
bourbon to start the day, of an Edenic village called Jayuya in a
Puerto Rican mountain valley where the nationalist revolution was
born, most of all of the way things were one hot day in 1950 on a
Washington, D.C. street when pistol shots crackled and men bled and
fought and died, and one more American President came within an
eyelash of being cut down, too.
